It is 1973 and Watergate is on everyone’s lips. Lucy Painter is a children's book illustrator and a single mother of two. She leaves New York and the married father of her children to live in a tightly knit Washington neighborhood in the house where she grew up and where she discovered her father’s suicide. Lucy hopes for a fresh start, but her life is full of secrets: her children know nothing of her father’s death or the identity of their own father. As the new neighbors enter their insular lives, her family’s safety and stability become threatened.

Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom.

Then Bernadette disappears. It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is problematic.

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

Monday, February 20, 2012

I featured THE LOST SAINTS OF TENNESSEE as a "Waiting On" Wednesday pick back in September, and it started a discussion with the author, Amy Franklin-Willis, who I found out was born in my hometown. I asked if she would be interested in writing a guest post upon publication of her debut novel, and she graciously agreed.

Quotables is an event in which I present authors with a meaningful (to me) passage from their novels and ask them to speak to it in whatever way they wish.

This novel delves into a Southern family over several decades, tracing the events leading up to and following a tragic death. Of particular interest is the relationship between the main character and his mother, and when I came across the following sentence, I thought it captured their ongoing conflict perfectly.

"The way you love is like sucking all the air out of a person's lungs and then telling him you'll breathe for him."

This quote is uttered by my main character Ezekiel when he is age 18 to his mother Lillian at the absolute lowest moment in their child/parent relationship. Prior to this line, Zeke discovers by accident how his mother has betrayed his twin brother Carter. From Zeke's perspective, he's had enough of his mother's manipulations and dreams for him over the past 18 years. Of her five children, Lillian poured her own lost ambitions into Zeke and anointed him, from a very early age, as the chosen son in their family, the one who would escape the small confines of working-class Clayton, Tennessee.

What Zeke views as his mother's abandonment of his developmentally disabled brother pushes him in this scene to sever ties with Lillian. Her actions have led them all to this place and both she and Zeke recognize that the life she coveted for Zeke might have been dealt a potentially fatal blow by causing Zeke to forgo his full scholarship to the University of Virginia to stay in Clayton to care for Carter.

When I initially wrote that line, I was fully immersed in Ezekiel's perspective, having only written the story in his voice at that point. Ezekiel and his brother Carter are exceptionally close, in part due to Zeke's role as Carter's champion and "bridge" to the rest of the world and partly because they are twins. Their tie to one another is deep and inexplicable. At 18, Zeke can not comprehend how his mother could betray Carter after he is severely beaten by local thugs not long after Zeke has left for his first semester of college far from home. To betray Carter is to betray Zeke. It's that simple for him. He knows that he would never have made the choice his mother makes following Carter's attack.

I would go on to revise the manuscript and expand the role of narrator to include Lillian, whose voice dominates the middle section of the book. Lillian is on a mission in the story to set the record straight about what really happened in the Cooper family as the boys were growing up. We all know that any story about a family without the inclusion of the mother's perspective is not telling the whole story. Lillian and Zeke have been estranged for 25 years following the above scene. I began to understand her experience--what it would have been like to be a 1960s mother trying to do the best she could for her child, for all her five of her children, when parenting them alone most of the time and always having money be tight and sometimes non-existent. Lillian has sacrificed mightily for her children but it is not enough. She has made devastating choices whose aftereffects ripple through the whole family. Her belief in Zeke's ability to transcend their place in the world of small town Clayton was critical to her. She needed one of the children to make it over what seemed an insurmountable wall around Clayton. That need ends up clouding one of the most important decisions of her life.

How far do we go as parents for our children? How do we tuck our own needs and aspirations into our children? How does a child respond to being the "favored" one? These are all themes I was trying to explore in Lost Saints. And when Zeke speaks those words to his mother they are true. He means them. But when he reflects years later on the events that led up to that moment, he looks back with the added insight of being a flawed parent himself and grants his mother some dispensation, though forgiveness may still be yet to come.
You can visit the author online here.

The publisher has offered a copy of this novel for me to give away. Just leave a comment below by Monday, March 5 at 1:00 p.m. CST, and I'll randomly pick a winner. Be sure to fill out the email portion of your comment form, so it won't be visible to others, but I will have a way to contact you.

Winn Van Meter has a Harvard education, membership in all the right clubs, a pedigreed wife, and a tastefully understated summer home on a pristine New England island where the wedding of his eldest daughter, Daphne, is about to take place. The weather is idyllic and so, it would seem, is the gathering. But, the bride is seven months pregnant; the maid of honor, Daphne's younger sister, has just had her heart broken by the son of her father's oldest rival; Aunt Celeste, herself on her fifth marriage, watches with a jaundiced eye as the groom's exceedingly well-dressed brothers stealthily make their way through the bridal party. And the irresistible siren call of Daphne's best friend, the bombshell bridesmaid Agatha, will drive the bride's father finally to combust, taking the family down with him in a raucous explosion of misplaced attention and thwarted desire, not to mention confetti and wedding cake.

It's July 4th, and the Frankel family is descending upon their beloved summer home in the Berkshires. But this is no ordinary holiday; the family is gathering for a memorial. Leo, the youngest of the four Frankel siblings and an intrepid journalist and adventurer, was killed one year ago while on assignment in Iraq. His parents, Marilyn and David, are adrift in grief, and it's tearing apart their 40-year marriage. Clarissa, the eldest, is struggling at 39 with infertility. Lily, a fiery-tempered lawyer, is angry about everything. Noelle, a born-again Orthodox Jew (and the last person to see Leo alive), has come in from Israel with her husband and four children and feels entirely out of place. And Thisbe--Leo's widow and mother of their three-year-old son--has arrived from California bearing her own secret. Over the course of three days, the Frankels will contend with sibling rivalries and marital feuds, volatile women and silent men, and, ultimately, with the true meaning of family.

Summer vacation on the island was supposed to be a restorative time for Kate, who'd lost her close friend Elizabeth in a sudden accident. But when she inherits a trunk of Elizabeth's journals, they reveal a woman far different than the cheerful wife and mother Kate had known. The complicated portrait of Elizabeth--her upbringing, her marriage, and journey to motherhood--makes Kate question not just their friendship, but her most fundamental beliefs about loyalty and deception at a time when she is uncertain in her own marriage. When an unfamiliar man's name appears in the pages, Kate realizes the extent of what she didn't know about her friend--including where she was really going when she died. Set in the anxious post-September 11th summer of 2002, this story of two women--their friendship, their marriages, private ambitions and fears--considers the aspects of ourselves we show and those we conceal, and the repercussions of our choices.